I miss the old Kanye: what has happened to raps most complex star?

His suggestion that black people have been complicit in their own slavery has prompted widespread outrage. What lies behind Kanye Wests recent provocations?

In a video viewed more than 6m times on Twitter, 21-year-old Chika Oranika summed up the current feelings of many black Americans about Kanye West. She delivered her own lyrics over the beat of the rap stars Jesus Walks. How you say you Yeezus but do nothing to restore us? You support the people up in power that abort us, she raps into the camera. It dont matter how much money you got or you lack, when that cheque clear dont forget that your children are still black.

Why the opprobrium, which has come from activists, Hollywood stars and fellow musicians, as well as withering online freestyles? West, one of the most significant, complex and celebrated rappers in the US, has used a 350-tweet stream of consciousness over the past fornight to throw his support firmly behind Donald Trump. But yesterday, he went way beyond party politics in an interview with TMZ, saying, in a sloppy bit of rhetoric: You hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice.

Host Van Lathan tore back at him: While you are making music and being an artist and living the life that youve earned by being a genius, the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives. Roxane Gay reacted on Twitter by calling his comments dangerous and trite, shallow he is not a free thinker. He is a free moron.

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From Taylor Swift to Hurricane Katrina: five of Kanye West’s memorable outbursts video

Black Americas dismay at West has been brewing for some time. He puzzled many when he posed for photos with Trump in December 2016, making him one of the first celebrities to apparently endorse the new president. But his recent tweets left no room for doubt. He posted a picture of himself wearing the Trump campaigns Make America Great Again cap, and tweeted: You dont have to agree with Trump but the mob cant make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. After an intervention by a presumably somewhat weary Kim Kardashian, West wrote: My wife just called me and she wanted me to make this clear to everyone. I dont agree with everything Trump does. I dont agree 100% with anyone but myself.

In response, R&B singer Frank Ocean emerged from hibernation with a sarcastic screengrab of the time West went off-script during a 2005 Hurricane Katrina appeal to say George Bush doesnt care about black people, the intimation being that it is now West who doesnt care. Samuel L Jackson suggested West was courting an audience in the sunken place the psychic interzone in the horror film Get Out into which black people are hypnotised and silenced (the films director, Jordan Peele, has previously linked it to Trumps America).

On New Slaves, meanwhile, from 2013 album Yeezus, West expressed a more nuanced version of his slavery comments this week: that black Americans were subject to a new kind of slavery, the rabid consumerism for Maybach cars and Alexander Wang clothes that traps them in economic bondage. Julius Bailey, a philosophy professor at Ohios Wittenberg University, who has edited a book of essays called The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, argues that West should be criticised for his TMZ interview, but on the basis that he didnt speak to the material implications of post-chattel slavery, as he has done on New Slaves and Clique. Kanyes heartfelt apology [to Van Lathan on TMZ after his comments]was a way of realising that his words, when not qualified or contextualised, do more damage than the emancipating good he seeks. Some of Wests other lyrics have been similarly clumsy, even offensive. He sampled Billie Holidays Strange Fruit, a song about lynching, for Blood on the Leaves, a song about the destructive power of fame in which he also compared a man having his wife and mistress separated at a basketball game to apartheid.

And since Yeezus, his self-obsession has become stifling. His 2016 album The Life of Pablo has a great skit called I Love Kanye, where he imagines: What if Kanye made a song about Kanye called I Miss the Old Kanye? Man, thatd be so Kanye!

In the wake of his slavery comments, the skit stops being funny: black people really do miss the old, outward-looking Kanye. Rapper Meek Mill summed up the thoughts of many when he posted an image of Kanye to Instagram yesterday, surrounded by the words RIP Old Kanye and quoting Kanyes lyrics back at him: I feel the pressure, under more scrutiny / And what I do? Act more stupidly.